The invention disclosed herein relates generally to object archiving and retrieval in computer systems.
Electronic mail (e-mail) has increasingly become a common and accepted manner of exchanging messages for individuals both at home and in the workplace. Indeed, some e-mail users send and receive hundreds or even thousands of messages each day. Managing this large volume of message traffic, however, has become a problem for both individual users and network administrators.
When messages are sent and received by a mail application, they are stored for review in folders which are typically part of a file commonly referred to as an e-mail information store (“IS”) that is designated to hold e-mail stored on the user's local computer or on a network storage device. Other types of applications such as directory services applications also have information stores which contain data specific to particular applications.
Over time, the IS typically grows in size as the user continues to receive and send more e-mail. This constantly increasing growth is problematic. Unless steps are periodically taken to reduce its size, the IS will eventually grow so large that it will use considerable amounts of disk space and also require excessive system resources to access its information. To keep the size of the IS under control and optimize system performance, administrators and users of e-mail systems have had to either delete or archive old or unwanted messages to release disk space. Both of these methods have serious drawbacks.
One problem associated with archiving old messages is that the archived messages are normally stored on the user's workstation in file formats such as .PST files which are difficult to manage. All references to individual messages archived to .PST files no longer appear in the inbox and these individual messages are no longer readily accessible by browsing the e-mail client GUI. In order to review individual archived messages, users must know which archive contains their message and must open the individual archive containing the message before being able to access the message contents. This process is often time-consuming with users frequently resorting to trial-and-error methods of opening archives to locate desired messages.
Deleting old or unwanted messages is an even less desirable solution than archiving such messages. While archive files are difficult to manage and to retrieve messages from, deleting old or unwanted messages makes management and retrieval even more difficult and frequently impossible. If the user has performed a system backup prior to deleting such messages, retrieval is sometimes still possible, but the user must then restore the entire the entire system from the backup to retrieve the messages. In the worst case, the messages are simply lost forever when they are deleted.
Further, even in a networked environment with a central e-mail sever such as, for example, a Microsoft Exchange Server, which contains a central IS, the normal backup process will also not directly help cut down the size of the IS. Backing up the IS will still leave all of the messages in the IS unless the individual users delete or archive messages at their workstations.
There is thus a need for a system which permits users to easily manage archiving and retrieving e-mail messages.
In addition, similar problems relating to archiving of old or unwanted objects exist in other directory services applications such as Microsoft's Active Directory, the University of Michigan's LDAP Servers, Lotus Notes, Microsoft's Sharepoint Portal, and other similar applications. In each of these applications, there exists a database similar to the Exchange IS which is constantly growing over time. System administrators must decide how much data in these databases is actually needed, how much should be archived, etc. One problem with archiving an entire directory services application database is that on restore, the entire database generally needs to be shut down even if only a small portion of the database needs to be restored. More single file restores are done than full system restores which results in inefficient use of system resources among other problems. There is thus also a need for a system which permits users to easily manage archiving and retrieving directory services and other similar application objects.